Deaths, Power Outages In South; Storm Heads North

The latest storm to roll off nature's assembly line this bustling winter spread heavy snow and sleet along the Northeast corridor Thursday, while utility crews in the ice-encrusted South labored to restore power to hundreds of thousands of shivering residents.

The sloppy weather shuttered schools and businesses, made driving scary, grounded more than 6,000 flights on Thursday alone and created more back-breaking work for people along the East Coast, where shoveling out has become a weekly chore - sometimes a twice-weekly one.

At least 17 deaths, most of them in traffic accidents, were blamed on the storm as it made its way across the South and up the coast.

The victims included a man hit by a falling tree limb in North Carolina and a truck driver in Ashburn, Va., who was working to clear snowy roads. He was standing behind his vehicle when he was hit by a dump truck.

Across the South, the storm left in its wake a world of ice-encrusted trees and driveways and snapped branches and power lines.

About 750,000 homes and businesses were left without power in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Alabama, with scattered outages reported in the mid-Atlantic.

More than 200,000 households and businesses in the Atlanta area alone were waiting for the electricity to come back on. Temperatures were expected to drop below freezing again overnight.

In North Carolina, where the storm caused huge traffic jams in the Raleigh area on Wednesday as people left work and rushed to get home in the middle of the day, National Guardsmen in high-riding Humvees patrolled the snowy roads, looking for stranded motorists.